Rationale:

The LWG believes this causes no harm and is not a defect in the standard. The only example anyone could come up with caused some incorrect code to work, rather than the other way around.

Overspecified For an insert iterator it, the expression *it is required to return a reference to it. This is a simple possible implementation, but as the SGI STL documentation says, not the only one, and the user should not assume that this is the case.